The 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists Have Been Announced

The National Book Critics Circle has nominated its 30 finalists for the best books of 2013. But first, a question.

What is The National Book Critics Circle?

The National Book Critics Circle was "founded in April 1974 at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City, with founding members John Leonard, Nona Balakian, and Ivan Sandrof intending to extend the Algonquin Round Table to a national conversation." The group elects titles in six categories —autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry — to be considered for The National Book Critics Circle Award.

Wait, what was the Algonquin Round Table?

Via gk2nist.tumblr.com

The Algonquin Round Table was a group of young literati "who favored the Algonquin Hotel as a daily meeting spot," setting "the standard for literary style and wit beyond its ten-year duration."

Members included Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Harold Ross, founding editor of The New Yorker who managed to launch the magazine with help from his Algonquin Round Table cohorts. You can learn more about the group, including the fact that the original members liked to refer to themselves as "The Vicious Circle," here.

OK. So who makes up the National Book Critics Circle now?

The NBCC board is made up of book review editors and book reviewers, for the most part, who serve rotating three-year terms. You can see exactly who's calling the shots here. Basically think of your most knowledgeable book-loving friend, and then imagine a whole crew of folks just like them, but probably with more degrees.

All right, super-smart book people with a history dating back to the early 1900s. Can we get to the recommendations already?

Without a doubt.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

Via knopfdoubleday.com

"In 2004, at a beach resort on the coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala and her family—parents, husband, sons—were swept away by a tsunami. Only Sonali survived to tell their tale. This is her account of the nearly incomprehensible event and its aftermath."

—Knopf

The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon

Via us.macmillan.com

"Aleksandar Hemon’s lives begin in Sarajevo, where boyhood is consumed by street soccer and sibling rivalry, and a young man’s life is about American music, bad poetry, and slightly better journalism. At the age of twenty-seven, Hemon journeyed to Chicago—a trip that would mark the beginning of another life, this time in the United States. There, he watched from afar as war broke out in Bosnia, his parents and sister fleeing, and Hemon himself unable to return."

—Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

Via us.penguingroup.com

"Rebecca Solnit explores the ways we make our lives out of stories, and how we are connected by empathy, by narrative, by imagination. In the course of unpacking some of her own stories—of her mother and her decline from memory loss, of a trip to Iceland, of an illness—Solnit revisits fairytales and entertains other stories: about arctic explorers, Che Guevara among the leper colonies, and Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, about warmth and coldness, pain and kindness, decay and transformation, making art and making self. Woven together, these stories create a map which charts the boundaries and territories of storytelling, reframing who each of us is and how we might tell our story."

—Viking

"Men We Reaped" by Jesmyn Ward

Via bloomsbury.com

"In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life—to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth—and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own."

—Bloomsbury

Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti by Amy Wilentz

Via books.simonandschuster.com

"A foreign correspondent on a simple story becomes, over time and in the pages of this book, a lover of Haiti, pursuing the heart of this beautiful and confounding land into its darkest corners and brightest clearings. Farewell, Fred Voodoo is a journey into the depths of the human soul as well as a vivid portrayal of the nation’s extraordinary people and their uncanny resilience."

—Simon & Schuster

BIOGRAPHY

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson

Via randomhouse.com

"The Arab Revolt against the Turks in World War One was, in the words of T.E. Lawrence, 'a sideshow of a sideshow.' Amidst the slaughter in European trenches, the Western combatants paid scant attention to the Middle Eastern theater. As a result, the conflict was shaped to a remarkable degree by a small handful of adventurers and low-level officers far removed from the corridors of power. "

—Doubleday

Jonathan Swift: His Live and His World by Leo Damrosch

Via yalepress.yale.edu

"Jonathan Swift is best remembered today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, the satiric fantasy that quickly became a classic and has remained in print for nearly three centuries. Yet Swift also wrote many other influential works, was a major political and religious figure in his time, and became a national hero, beloved for his fierce protest against English exploitation of his native Ireland. What is really known today about the enigmatic man behind these accomplishments? Can the facts of his life be separated from the fictions? In this deeply researched biography, Leo Damrosch draws on discoveries made over the past thirty years to tell the story of Swift’s life anew."

—Yale University Press

Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Eliot Gardiner

Via randomhouse.com

"Gardiner’s background as a historian has encouraged him to search for ways in which scholarship and performance can cooperate and fruitfully coalesce. This has entailed piecing together the few biographical shards, scrutinizing the music, and watching for those instances when Bach’s personality seems to penetrate the fabric of his notation. Gardiner’s aim is 'to give the reader a sense of inhabiting the same experiences and sensations that Bach might have had in the act of music-making. This, I try to show, can help us arrive at a more human likeness discernible in the closely related processes of composing and performing his music.'"

—Knopf

Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore by Linda Leavell

Via us.macmillan.com

"The Marianne Moore that survives in the popular imagination is dignified, white-haired, and demure in her tricorne hat; she lives with her mother until the latter’s death; she maintains meaningful friendships with fellow poets but never marries or falls in love. Linda Leavell’s Holding On Upside Down—the first biography of this major American poet written with the support of the Moore estate—delves beneath the surface of this calcified image to reveal a passionate, canny woman caught between genuine devotion to her mother and an irrepressible desire for personal autonomy and freedom. Her many poems about survival are not just quirky nature studies but acts of survival themselves."

—Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Birth Certificate: The Story of Danilo Kiš by Mark Thompson

Via cornellpress.cornell.edu

"A subtle analysis of a rich and varied body of writing, Birth Certificate is also a careful and sensitive telling of a life that experienced some of the last century's greatest cruelties. Kis's father was a Hungarian Jew, his mother a Montenegrin of Orthodox faith. The father disappeared into the Holocaust and the son—cosmopolitan, anticommunist, and passionately opposed to the myth-drenched nationalisms of his native lands—grew up chafing against the hypocrisies of Titoism. His writing broke with the epic mode, pioneered modernist techniques in his language, fulminated against literary kitsch, and sketched out a literary heritage 'with no Sun as its Center and Tyrant.'"

—Cornell University Press

CRITICISM

White Girls by Hilton Als

Via store.mcsweeneys.net

"White Girls, Hilton Als’s first book since The Women seventeen years ago, finds one of The New Yorker’s boldest cultural critics deftly weaving together his brilliant analyses of literature, art, and music with fearless insights on race, gender, and history. The result is an extraordinary, complex portrait of 'white girls,' as Als dubs them—an expansive but precise category that encompasses figures as diverse as Truman Capote and Louise Brooks, Malcolm X and Flannery O’Connor. In pieces that hairpin between critique and meditation, fiction and non-fiction, high culture and low, the theoretical and the deeply personal, Als presents a stunning portrait of a writer by way of his subjects, and an invaluable guide to the culture of our time."

—McSweeney's

Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations by Mary Beard

Via books.wwnorton.com

"Mary Beard, drawing on thirty years of teaching and writing about Greek and Roman history, provides a panoramic portrait of the classical world, a book in which we encounter not only Cleopatra and Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Hannibal, but also the common people—the millions of inhabitants of the Roman Empire, the slaves, soldiers, and women. How did they live? Where did they go if their marriage was in trouble or if they were broke? Or, perhaps just as important, how did they clean their teeth? Effortlessly combining the epic with the quotidian, Beard forces us along the way to reexamine so many of the assumptions we held as gospel—not the least of them the perception that the Emperor Caligula was bonkers or Nero a monster. With capacious wit and verve, Beard demonstrates that, far from being carved in marble, the classical world is still very much alive."

—Liveright

The Kraus Project by Karl Kraus, translated and annotated by Jonathan Franzen with Paul Reiter and Daniel Kehlmann

Via us.macmillan.com

"A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and farsighted writers in Europe. In his self-published magazine, Die Fackel, Kraus brilliantly attacked the popular media’s manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumer capitalism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though he had a fervent following, which included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Luckily, Jonathan Franzen is one of them."

—Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm

Via us.macmillan.com

"In Forty-one False Starts, Janet Malcolm brings together essays published over the course of several decades (largely in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books) that reflect her preoccupation with artists and their work. Her subjects are painters, photographers, writers, and critics. She explores Bloomsbury’s obsessive desire to create things visual and literary; the 'passionate collaborations' behind Edward Weston’s nudes; and the character of the German art photographer Thomas Struth, who is 'haunted by the Nazi past,' yet whose photographs have 'a lightness of spirit.' In 'The Woman Who Hated Women,' Malcolm delves beneath the 'onyx surface' of Edith Wharton’s fiction, while in 'Advanced Placement' she relishes the black comedy of the Gossip Girl novels of Cecily von Zeigesar. In 'Salinger’s Cigarettes,' Malcolm writes that 'the pettiness, vulgarity, banality, and vanity that few of us are free of, and thus can tolerate in others, are like ragweed for Salinger’s helplessly uncontaminated heroes and heroines.' 'Over and over,' as Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, 'she has demonstrated that nonfiction—a book of reporting, an article in a magazine, something we see every day—can rise to the highest level of literature.'

—Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Distant Reading by Franco Moretti

Via versobooks.com

"In the ten essays collected in this volume, Franco Moretti reconstructs the intellectual trajectory of his philosophy of ‘distant reading’. From the evolutionary model of ‘Modern European Literature’, through the geo-cultural dominant of ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ and ‘Planet Hollywood’ to the quantitative findings of ‘Style, inc.’ and the abstract patterns of ‘Network Theory, Plot Analysis’, the book follows two decades of critical explorations that have come to define – well beyond the wildest expectations of its author – a growing field of unorthodox literary studies."

—Verso

FICTION

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Via randomhouse.com

"As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are leaving the country if they can. Ifemelu—beautiful, self-assured—departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze—the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor—had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London."

—Knopf

Someone by Alice McDermott

Via us.macmillan.com

"Our first glimpse of Marie is as a child: a girl in glasses waiting on a Brooklyn stoop for her beloved father to come home from work. A seemingly innocuous encounter with a young woman named Pegeen sets the bittersweet tone of this remarkable novel. Pegeen describes herself as an 'amadan,' a fool; indeed, soon after her chat with Marie, Pegeen tumbles down her own basement stairs. The magic of McDermott’s novel lies in how it reveals us all as fools for this or that, in one way or another."

—Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Infatuations by Javier Marias

Via randomhouse.com

"At the Madrid café where she stops for breakfast each day before work, María Dolz finds herself drawn to a couple who is also there every morning. Though she can hardly explain it, observing what she imagines to be their 'unblemished' life lifts her out of the doldrums of her own existence. But what begins as mere observation turns into an increasingly complicated entanglement when the man is fatally stabbed in the street. María approaches the widow to offer her condolences, and at the couple’s home she meets—and falls in love with—another man who sheds disturbing new light on the crime. As María recounts this story, we are given a murder mystery brilliantly reimagined as metaphysical enquiry, a novel that grapples with questions of love and death, guilt and obsession, chance and coincidence, how we are haunted by our losses, and above all, the slippery essence of the truth and how it is told."

—Knopf

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Via us.penguingroup.com

"In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future."

—Viking

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Via hachettebookgroup.com

"It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art."

—Little, Brown

NONFICTION

Whitey Bulger: America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice by Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy

Via books.wwnorton.com

"Raised in a South Boston housing project, James 'Whitey' Bulger became the most wanted fugitive of his generation. In this riveting story, rich with family ties and intrigue, award-winning Boston Globe reporters Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy follow Whitey’s extraordinary criminal career—from teenage thievery to bank robberies to the building of his underworld empire and a string of brutal murders."

—Norton

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sherri Fink

Via randomhouse.com

"After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths. Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing."

—Crown

Thank You for Your Service by David Finkel

Via us.macmillan.com

"In Thank You for Your Service, Finkel has done something even more extraordinary. Once again, he has embedded with some of the men of the 2-16—but this time he has done it at home, here in the States, after their deployments have ended. He is with them in their most intimate, painful, and hopeful moments as they try to recover, and in doing so, he creates an indelible, essential portrait of what life after war is like—not just for these soldiers, but for their wives, widows, children, and friends, and for the professionals who are truly trying, and to a great degree failing, to undo the damage that has been done."

—Sarah Crichton Books / Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

Via us.macmillan.com

"The Unwinding journeys through the lives of several Americans, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers, who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who questions the Internet’s significance and arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era’s leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics that capture the flow of events and their undercurrents."

—Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

Via knopfdoubleday.com

"Scientology presents itself as a scientific approach to spiritual enlightenment, but its practices have long been shrouded in mystery. Now Lawrence Wright—armed with his investigative talents, years of archival research, and more than two hundred personal interviews with current and former Scientologists—uncovers the inner workings of the church. We meet founder L. Ron Hubbard, the highly imaginative but mentally troubled science-fiction writer, and his tough, driven successor, David Miscavige. We go inside their specialized cosmology and language. We learn about the church’s legal attacks on the IRS, its vindictive treatment of critics, and its phenomenal wealth. We see the church court celebrities such as Tom Cruise while consigning its clergy to hard labor under billion-year contracts. Through it all, Wright asks what fundamentally comprises a religion, and if Scientology in fact merits this Constitutionally-protected label. Brilliantly researched, compellingly written, Going Clear pulls back the curtain on one of the most secretive organizations at work today."

—Knopf

POETRY

Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart

Via us.macmillan.com

"In 'Those Nights,' Frank Bidart writes: 'We who could get / somewhere through / words through / sex could not.' Words and sex, art and flesh: In Metaphysical Dog, Bidart explores their nexus. The result stands among this deeply adventurous poet’s most powerful and achieved work, an emotionally naked, fearlessly candid journey through many of the central axes, the central conflicts, of his life, and ours."

—Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Stay, Illusion by Lucie Brock-Broido

Via knopfdoubleday.com

"Eddying between the theater of the lavish and the enigmatic, between the gaudy and the unadorned, Brock-Broido’s verse scours America for material to render unflinchingly the here and now. Grandeur devolves into a comic irony: 'We have come to terms with our Self / Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit.' She dares the unexplained: 'The wings were left ajar / At the altar where I’ve knelt all night, trembling, leaning, rough / As sugar raw, and sweet.' Each poem is a rebellious chain of words: 'Be good, they said, and so too I was / Good until I was not.' Strange narratives, interior and exterior, make a world that is foreign and yet our own; like Dickinson, Brock-Broido constructs a spider-sibling, commanding the 'silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania.' And why create the web? Because: 'If it is written down, you can’t rescind it.'"

—Knopf

Blowout by Denise Duhamel

Via upress.pitt.edu

"In Denis Duhamel's Blowout, the Florida poet admits she is 'a love-struck fool.' However, in her inimitable style, she embraces the crazy wisdom of the Fool of the Tarot deck, the fool as entertainer or jester. From a kindergarten crush to a failed marriage and beyond, Dumael explores the nature of romantic love and her own limitations."

—University of Pittsburgh Press

Elegy Owed by Bob Hicok

Via coppercanyonpress.org{D664C527-E285-460D-9EBD-D60B3D9F1CA9}

"Elegy Owed, Hicok’s eighth book, is an existential game of Twister in which the rules of mourning are broken and salvaged, and 'you can never step into the same not going home again twice.' His poems are the messenger at the door, the unwanted telegram—telling a joke, imparting a depth of longing, returning us finally to a different kind of normality where 'the dead have no ears, no answering machines / that we know of, still we call.' There is grief in these poems, but it is a grief large enough for odd awakenings and the unexpected, a grief enlarged by music, color, and joy as well as sober wisdom."

—Copper Canyon

Milk and Filth by Carmen Gimenez Smith

Via uapress.arizona.edu

"Giménez Smith's poetic arsenal includes rapier-sharp wordplay mixed with humor, at times self-deprecating, at others an ironic comment on the postmodern world, all interwoven with imaginative language of unexpected force and surreal beauty. Revealing a long view of gender issues and civil rights, the author presents a clever, comic perspective. Her poems take the reader to unusual places as she uses rhythm, images, and emotion to reveal the narrator's personality. Deftly blending a variety of tones and styles, Giménez Smith's poems offer a daring and evocative look at deep cultural issues."

—University of Arizona Press